BOOKS IN BRIEF: NONFICTION

Date:
October 15, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline:
By CASEY KING
Lead:

HIGH TIDE IN TUCSON
Essays From Now or Never.
By BarbaraKingsolver.
HarperCollins, $22.

BarbaraKingsolver's essays in "High Tide in Tucson" should be savored like quiet afternoons with a friend. Ms. Kingsolver, whose books include the novels "Pigs in Heaven," "Animal Dreams" and "The Bean Trees," speaks in language rich with music and replete with good sense. Her subjects are diverse -- fidelity, ethnicity, motherhood and humankind's unique place in the animal kingdom. We are shepherded from Ms. Kingsolver's home in Tucson, Ariz., where a hermit crab far from the sea manages to find its circadian rhythm, to Garajonay National Park in the Canary Islands. We are taken on the road, playing in a band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, that includes her fellow novelists Stephen King and Amy Tan, and to an American Indian museum in Phoenix. It is there that Ms. Kingsolver addresses the issue of ethnicity and a writer's right to tell stories from cultures not her own. "I can think of no genetic credentials that could entitle a writer to do this -- only a keen ear, empathy, caution, willingness to be criticized, and a passionate attraction to the subject," she writes. "The point is not to emulate other lives, or usurp their wardrobes. The point is to find sense." In these essays, most of them previously published, Ms. Kingsolver makes clear that "bearing witness is not the same thing as possession."
CASEY KING